Sarna News

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Helen has two continents, Joppa and Persephonie, and deep oceans which have a wide variety of undersea life. The most well-known of these is the Great Helenic Whale, a sharklike predator that can grow to four times the size of the Great White Shark on Terra. (Though named a whale, it's not actually a mammal.) The diverse underwater ecology forms the basis of Helen's economy, with tourism being the major industry. Many scientific surveys have also taken place on Helen, investigating the aquatic lifeforms. During the Star League a large floating scientific outpost named "Aquanis" sailed Helen's seas performing various studies. During the Succession Wars, Aquanis sank beneath the waves. Today it's another popular tourist attraction.[1]

Settled during the early exodus from Terra, by the twenty-forth century Helen was already a wealthy independent world. Shortly after Helen signed a mutual defence pact with the nearby worlds of Errai and Quentin it was targetted for conquest by Director-GeneralJames McKenna of the newly-formed Terran Hegemony. Having secured his hold over all of the worlds within the rump state of the Terran Alliance, McKenna began a "Campaign of Persuasion" to bring other former Alliance worlds and independent worlds into the Hegemony through military force, and the three allied worlds of Errai, Helen, and Quentin were his first targets.[2]

McKenna attacked the Helen system with a large fleet of WarShips, and despite knowing that there was little chance of resisting the invasion, the leaders of each of the three allied worlds planned to teach McKenna a lesson; all three worlds converted fleets of cargo and interplanetary courier ships into fighting vessels by adding lasers and missile tubes to battle in space, and all three worlds beefed up their ground forces with large militia forces of trained personnel augmented by volunteers. The colonists on Helen fought a dogged, even fanatical, campaign of resistance against the Hegemony Armed Forces before finally being conquered, and the resistance offered by those on Helen taught the HAF a number of harsh lessons.[2]

Like the vast majority of the worlds within the Terran Hegemony, Helen was occupied by forces loyal to Stefan Amaris following his coup on the 27th of December 2766.[52][53] The subsequent occupation was very harsh for the local population; a planet with a huge artistic community, Helen was assigned the Burning Tygersmercenary unit as a part of their garrison. The Burning Tygers proceeded to loot and ransack the artistic community, killing upwards of one hundred thousand innocent civilians during the occupation; with Amaris' government exercising almost complete control over the HPG network and news channels, the desperate cries for help from the population of Helen went unheard as they suffered at the hands of the Tygers.[52]